In the years that followed, The Times became disillusioned with Aberdeen because of his lack of bellicosity in the approach to the Crimean War, and lack of vigour in its conduct. The war correspondent William Howard Russell, who there made his reputation, denounced the inefficiencies of supply and generalship and played a significant role in the replacement of Aberdeen by Palmerston in 1855. The Times, however, took a year or two to adjust to its new loyalty. Delane did not become an habitué of Broadlands or Cambridge House until the end of the decade, and amongst the first acts of the new government was one which was thought to be highly inimical to the interests of The Times. This was the abolition of the newspaper tax.
The change meant much cheaper newspapers, and in the possibly exaggerated language of John Bright set The Times ‘howling, and splashing about like a harpooned whale’. It was assumed that the move would damage the oligopoly, with The Times as clear market leader, which a few established journals enjoyed. This was true to the extent that The Times fairly quickly lost, and never regained, its position as the paper of greatest circulation. By 1861 the Daily Telegraph was selling about 140,000 against The Times’s regular 65,000. The abolition of the tax also led to a substantial, but not permanent, shift in the balance between the London and the provincial press. Before it there was little of substance published in England outside the capital. By 1864 the circulation of the provincials was nearly twice that of the London papers.
But the change did not damage the influence of The Times, or its profitability, and increased its circulation in absolute terms. Its 1861 figure was about a third up on that of a few years before and concealed occasional surges: 89,000 on the day after the Prince Consort’s death and 86,000 when it published a nine-column obituary of Palmerston.
The gain in circulation was far from being worth the loss of Palmerston. The Times had not been his client, but Delane had certainly done well out of the connection. Palmerston had supplied him with information and given him a government and a statesman he could mostly support with a good conscience. He had even offered him the permanent under-secretaryship of the War Office in 1861 when he heard that his eyes were failing through too much night work. Now Delane was left without a lodestar. Lord John Russell, who succeeded, was as unattractive to him as he had been twenty years before. Gladstone had not hitherto been much of a favourite in Printing House Square. And the efforts of the third and last short Derby-Disraeli Government to get Delane on their side proved as abortive as on the previous occasions. The paper, largely due to the influence of Robert Lowe, MP for Calne, and a Times leader writer for fifteen years, was also cool in its approach to the second Reform Bill, in marked contrast to its ‘thundering’ in 1831, and somewhat to the annoyance of John Walter III.
The Times soon reconciled itself both to reform and to Gladstone. It supported him with an unwonted partisanship, both in 1868, when he won, and in 1874, when he lost. Delane, who always had exceptional gifts of seeing what was likely to happen, correctly and exceptionally foresaw the result of the Franco-Prussian War. Yet throughout the twelve years from Palmerston’s death in 1865 to Delane’s retirement there is a distinct sense of a slowly declining sun. Even the circulation, often the last index to respond to a decline of quality, dropped below 60,000 by the turn of the decade. Despite the offer of a pension of £2000, munificent by the standards of the age, Walter had to assert himself in 1877 to get Delane out and Thomas Chenery in. ‘But who will look after the social side of the business?’ Disraeli asked when he heard of the change.
Chenery was the least successful of The Times’s nineteenth-century editors. He was, however, the first of a series of gentlemen scholars to occupy the editorial chair. He was the first editor to be an Etonian (there have been two subsequent ones). He was a graduate of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and since 1868 had been Professor of Arabic at Oxford while continuing his long-standing leader-writing role on the paper. He was fifty-four when appointed, but this long period of waiting did not give him longevity. True in this respect to the tradition of Barnes and Delane, he was burnt out before he was sixty. His years were notable mainly for the employment of the remarkable Blowitz to cover the Congress of Berlin in 1878, and for swinging the paper, which had been critical of the demagoguery of the Midlothian campaign, into a mildly pro-Gladstone position for the beginning of his second administration in 1880.
George Buckle, with two or three years’ experience in Printing House Square, succeeded in 1884 at the age of twenty-nine. He was the son of a cathedral-close clergyman with strong academic connections. He went to Winchester and New College, and was a Fellow of All Souls, thus beginning a link between The Times and that peculiar Oxford institution which was to last, with a short break, until Geoffrey Dawson’s retirement as editor nearly sixty years later.